Key Factors for Creating an Innovative Context – a Study of the Development of the BMW i3

Abstract: Innovation has been identified as essential for organisations to stay competitive in existing or entirely new markets, as well as a necessity for long term survival. The ability to innovate is affected by the external environment in the industry and by the internal environment within the organisation. We focused on internal parameters that influenced an innovative development project in the automobile industry. An organisation may shape its internal environment by reducing hurdles as well as strengthening key factors that foster innovations. We combined factors identified by a literature review to build our theoretical framework consisting of seven internal organisational parameters that may form an innovative context. These are: top management support, advocates for intrapreneurship (entrepreneurship within existing organisations), the physical environment, organisational structure, resources, rewards and risk taking. The purpose of this paper was to identify these internal organisational factors and their importance in creating an innovative context in the BMW i3 development project. Our data collection consisted of ten interviews of management and employees involved in the BMW i3 project in which the key factors were addressed. The participants also had the opportunity to rank the importance of the identified internal organisational factors. Our findings showed that all factors have some importance in creating an innovative context. We find that top management support and advocates for intrapreneurship were the most important factors, followed by risk taking. The importance of the factors showed differences as well as similarities between the literature and our case. Management support, being an inherently wide term and most often including both top management support, advocates and other elements, was found to be of high importance in similar studies as well. A discrepancy was found regarding rewards, which was found to be important in similar studies but was ranked as least important in our case. This study contributes to the knowledge about organisational factors that should be considered by firms that strive to create an innovative context. The lessons gleamed from this study can be useful in typical innovative projects in the automotive industry and other technology industries.